Description

Michael C. Anderson received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1994, under the mentorship of Robert and Elizabeth Bjork. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience with Art Shimamura at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the Psychology faculty at the University of Oregon, where he rose to Full Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience. In 2007, Anderson moved the Memory Control Lab to the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where he accepted a Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience, before finally moving to the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England, in the Autumn of 2009. Dr. Anderson has been a visiting scholar in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University with John Gabrieli, is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and is on the governing board of the Psychonomics Society. Dr. Anderson's research on memory control has been featured in Newsweek, US News and World Report, the New York Times, CNN, BBC World News, and the New Scientist (see Media section).

Abstract

To most people, forgetting is a human frailty — something to be avoided and overcome. But more often than we realize, forgetting is precisely what we want and need to do. In this talk, I describe a program of research examining how our tendency to attend to or ignore memories that come to mind shapes what remains accessible in long-term memory. I focus in particular on advances in our understanding of the cognitive, systems, and circuit mechanisms underpinning retrieval stopping — our ability to actively halt the recall of unwanted memories — and how this process enables us to forget the thoughts and memories we would prefer not to have. Building on this understanding, we have developed and tested an intervention that trains people to suppress fearful thoughts about the future, significantly improving mental health outcomes, especially in patients high in anxiety and post-traumatic stress. These findings argue that forgetting, far from being a frailty, is an essential capacity for achieving resilience to life's stresses — and that deficits in adaptive forgetting underlie intrusive thinking across a range of psychological disorders.